In popular music, the digital revolution -- precisely the development that
Pirate Cinema, ca. 2005, tried to argue for in the context of cinema: that the
gradual disintegration of a cultural industry through copyright infringement,
the tendential crisis of its means of commodification, caused by the widely
unrestricted global exchange of information among individuals, would lead to
the emergence not only of new works or artists, but of entire genres and scenes
that were unthinkable under the regime of market research, rights management
and artificial scarcity -- has in fact taken place. Much like in the 1980s,
we're in a golden era of popular music, witnessing a massive explosion of
productivity that is largely independent from any form of established music
industry. And even though artists have to pay a yet-to-be-determined price for
their newfound autonomy -- specifically the fact that so much of the energy
released by the collapse of the separation of labor is immediately recaptured
by social media and other forms of voluntary digital self-management -- many of
them seem to operate at a relatively healthy distance from the new modes of
online consumerism (downloadable commodities, mobile marketplaces, music as a
service, paid-for curation of free content, etc.) by which the digital music
industries attempt to channel the current crisis of overproduction. This
distance isn't always classically critical, but often large enough to allow for
reflection, and compared to the "the problem with music" as diagnosed by Steve
Albini in 1993 (1), the post-Napster generation of artists appears to be
significantly less naïve with regards to the business of pop music, and finds
itself in an objectively more fortunate economic situation (2). At the same
time, their audiences have access to unheard-of amounts of music, and even if
this quantitative leap may come with a qualitative regression -- see William
Gibson about punk as the last pre-digital counterculture (3) -- it's really
hard to argue against the democratizing effects of communications technology.

Cinema however carries on as if nothing had happened. And while it's easy to
claim that cinema is simply a different type of medium -- the only genuinely
fordist art form, and the one that cannot, like music, just revert back from
mass-produced recordings to a prior economy of live performance -- we don't
think that's the full story, and a lot of it is mythical anyway. For example,
at some point in the history of popular music, the orchestra gets thrown out,
and that doesn't happen as a management decision in order to cut costs, but as
an artistic choice that allows for new degrees of creative freedom. And there
is no reason why the same thing cannot happen in cinema. Anyone who has ever
seen the closing titles of any average-budget movie will realize that this is
the most ideological image in the entire arsenal of cinema: here's how much
highly specialized labor is needed to make a film, here's how much funding is
required to get it into cinemas, and here's the long list of institutions and
organizations and corporations and holders of various rights and patents
without which none of this would be possible. Of course there was "video",
vaguely parallel to "indie" in music, but it hardly ever challenged "cinema" on
its own turf. Of course there were occasional movements, from Dogme 95 to
Mumblecore, that tried to break free from fordist constraints, but most of them
eagerly marketed themselves into a corner, became marginal subgenres rather
than expressions of a major crisis at the core of cinema. And of course there
are about ten or twelve fantastic South-East Asian filmmakers who heavily rely
on BitTorrent to reach western audiences, but sooner or later, the festival
circuit will suck them up, and then their work, since there is no place for it
in cinema, is going to disappear into YouTube, Netflix or yet another Biennial.

In the U.S., there is one single person who does what we had hoped thousands
would do, which is to practically articulate his or her discontent with cinema
as usual *outside* the existing underground of cheap low-fi do-it-yourself
filmmaking that remains as aesthetically indistinct and void of issues as
1990s indie rock. It took him nine years to follow up Primer (budget: 7,000
USD), which eventually became an Internet sleeper hit, with Upstream Color
(budget: 50,000 USD), in which he returns as writer, director, producer,
cinematographer, editor, sound designer and lead actor, and his most memorable
claim regarding the latter is that "there isn't a molecule of Hollywood that
touched this" (4). Both films would be even better if there were more such
films, if the position from which they were made was less solitary, if there
was some sort of scene around them, or just anybody with a similar approach to
cinema. But there isn't, and so all we've got are two strange films by Shane
Carruth, both rather meticulously structured ambient works with recurring loops
(5) and subtle glitches (6), one about time travel that shows how time travel,
if it actually worked, would actually work, and one about biology whose main
protagonist, passing through humans, then animals, then plants, is a parasite.
It's not much, yes, we're aware of that, but it's still better than nothing.
This is how one could make movies in the era of the Internet, and unless the
media industry turns it into television, there is still room for improvement.